Japan Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant blog
Tracking Fukushima news from day 1 : | Now one of the world's largest Public Available Repositories of the Chronology of the Daiichi Nuclear ongoing Disaster.
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Monday, 31 October 2011

Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office Yasuhiro Sonoda, who briefs the media about the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima plant, staged a reckless safety appeal Monday by drinking a glass of supposedly "safe" water — decontaminated from low-level radioactive water taken from puddles inside the buildings housing reactors 5 and 6 at the plant.

Cesium light?: Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office Yasuhiro Sonoda drinks a glass of decontaminated water taken from the Fukushima No. 1 plant during a news conference Monday at Tepco headquarters in Tokyo. KYODO PHOTO

Sonoda, a Lower House member from the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, said he drank the water after freelance journalists repeatedly prodded him during previous news conferences to "prove" the environment around the stricken plant is safe, as claimed by the government and Tokyo Electric Power Co.

Monday, 24 October 2011

A leading Japanese journalist recently made two incredible claims about the Fukushima power plant that suffered a nuclear meltdown in March 2011, sending shockwaves around the world.
First, the former editor of a national newspaper in Japan says the U.S. and Israel knew Fukushima had weapons-grade uranium and plutonium that were exposed to the atmosphere after a massive tsunami wave hit the reactor.
Second, he contends that Israeli intelligence sabotaged the reactor in retaliation for Japan’s support of an independent Palestinian state.

Saturday, 22 October 2011

.............(NaturalNews) Authorities from Fukushima and other disaster-stricken areas in Japan say they do not have the capacity to process and dispose of all the radioactive rubble left over from the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck back in March...........

But how radioactive is this waste, truly, and is it safe to begin transporting large amounts of it to areas located in very close proximity to Japan’s largest population center? Many are now asking this question as the government moves forward with its plans, especially since ash left over from burning contaminated rubble has in some cases exceeded 100,000 becquerels per kilogram (Bq/kg) ( [link to mdn.mainichi.jp]

A large portion of that waste is going to be transferred to Tokyo, according to a recent report by The Mainichi Daily News, a move that some are concerned may result in additional environmental and human harm

MARK COLVIN: It's more than seven months since the nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima and thousands of evacuees are coming to the realisation that they'll never be able to go home.

There are many radioactive hot-spots around the nuclear plant - some with radiation levels comparable with the zone around Chernobyl.

That means many communities will be no-go areas for decades.

And many who've been forced from their homes are scathing about the way the Japanese government has handled the crisis.

They say it's abandoned them to deal with the disaster themselves.

Our correspondent Mark Willacy made the journey into one of the Fukushima hot-spots, along the way profiling three of those affected by the meltdowns.

(sound of Buddhist song)

MARK WILLACY: It's a Buddhist sutra of rebirth; chanted by a monk whose community is dying.

Koyu Abe is the chief monk at Fukushima's 400-year old Joenji Temple. He's watched as the nuclear fall-out has settled silently on his district.

"This radiation is like invisible snow" he tells me. "It's fallen and brought us a long winter. But eventually this snow will melt, and spring will come" he says.

(sound of Geiger counter)

MARK WILLACY: Critical of government inaction, Monk Abe has decided to do something about the radiation choking his community; offering to take contaminated top soil from people in his community.

On temple land, on top of a hill, he demonstrates just how contaminated these bags of earth are.

(sound of Geiger counter screeching)

"The radiation level here is so high that some of the Geiger counters can't measure it" the monk tells me. "But I still accept this contaminated soil from my fellow residents" he says.

To investigate just how choked with contamination this region is, I drive closer to the Fukushima reactors, to Iitate, a community designated by the government as a radiation hot-spot.

I go to the dairy farm of Kenichi Hasegawa. Near here, just a couple of weeks ago, they found plutonium.

"I have absolutely no trust in the government" farmer Hasegawa tells me. "I thought they could deal with a nuclear accident, but it is a joke. So now all they do is cover up and hide data. What the hell are they doing?" he asks.

Mr Hasegawa then takes me outside his barn, and he places a Geiger counter on the ground.

(sound of Geiger counter)

MARK WILLACY: Let's see what it does.

(sound of Geiger counter screeching)

MARK WILLACY: It doesn't like that very much, does it?

The Geiger counter confirms that Mr Hasegawa's farm is a hot-spot, with readings several times beyond what's considered safe.

So his family has walked off the land; his cattle have been slaughtered or sold; a way of life has come to an end.

But so too have lives themselves.

With Mr Hasegawa, a stoic, grizzled farmer in his late fifties, breaking down into tears while telling me of the suicide of a friend; another farmer forced off his land by radiation.

"When I heard the news I went to his home and he was already in a coffin. But I still couldn't believe it" he says. "I opened the coffin then I saw him. Before the nuclear disaster he'd been so happy" he says.

There are thousands of others, like Kenichi Hasegawa, who will probably never be able to return to their homes.

Tomoe Unuma and her daughter Hana lived in Futaba, just two-and-a-half kilometres from the reactors. Now they live in a school turned shelter, their only privacy provided by cardboard box walls separating their floor space from that of other evacuees just a couple of metres away.

"I'd like to go home, if it was the same as before" Tomoe Unuma tells me. "I was born and raised in that community. But with the contamination I think I should just give up. Plus I can't take my daughter there" she says.

"I think about home sometimes", says 10-year-old Hana. "But I know I can't go back and that makes me sad" she says.

(singing and chanting)

MARK WILLACY: Back at the Joenji temple, monk Koyu Abe is chanting his sutra of rebirth but he knows some Fukushima communities are already dead.

"Monks like me must ease people's suffering. If there's something I can do, I need to take action" he says.

This is Mark Willacy in Fukushima for PM.

MARK COLVIN: Mark Willacy's full report can be seen tonight on Lateline on ABC1.

Friday, 21 October 2011

BERKELEY, Oct. 18 — The Nuclear Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley has posted new test results for store-bought milk from the San Francisco Bay Area.
The total amount of radioactive cesium increased slightly since the last test, and has risen steadily since the minimum detectable amount was lowered in August.
Results:Bay Area store-bought milk sample with best buy date of October 10, 2011

Cs-134 @ 0.056 Becquerel per kilogram (Bq/kg)

Cs-137 @ 0.088 Bq/kg

SOURCE: UC Berkeley

Conversion: 27.1 picocuries (pCi) in a Becquerel
The sample has 3.888 pCi/l of radioactive cesium, compared with the EPA’s Maximum Contaminant Level of 3.0 pCi/l.
“EPA lumps these gamma and beta emitters together under one collective MCL [Maximum Contaminant Level], so if you’re seeing cesium-137 in your milk or water, the MCL is 3.0 picocuries per liter; if you’re seeing iodine-131, the MCL is 3.0; if you’re seeing cesium-137 and iodine-131, the MCL is still 3.0.” -Forbes.com

Thursday, 20 October 2011

Little remembered after his death more than three decades ago, Kikawada made what he called a “deal with the devil” to take the utility known as Tepco into nuclear power. That decision provided energy to Toyota Motor Corp., Sony Corp. and the other companies that built Japan from the devastation of World War II into the world's second-largest economy. The Fukushima disaster came 66 years after the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and may mark a turning point in Japan's future as fundamental as the bombs that ended the war.

Atomic Devil

Japan's experience as the only country to be attacked with atomic weapons made its embrace of nuclear power as unlikely as its rapid economic recovery. Yet Kikawada wasn't the only businessman to conclude that the atomic “devil” could make that growth possible.

From 1945, Japan based its economic recovery on rebuilding its power industry, initially with oil and coal and later with a so-called nuclear village. The term describes a nuclear- industrial complex comprising utilities and manufacturers supported by politicians, bureaucrats and academics that promoted atomic energy to power fast-expanding industries in steel, shipbuilding, cars and electronics.

“The nuclear village's core argument is that it offers low-cost, reliable power essential for a modern and competitive economy,” Andrew DeWit, a professor of the politics of public finance at Tokyo's Rikkyo University, said in an interview. “But those claims are rapidly losing credibility in the public debate because after Fukushima the cost of nuclear power has become greater. The nuclear village is unraveling.”

Hiroshima Bombing

Japan's development into the world's third-biggest user of nuclear energy dates from the last days of the war. Yasuhiro Nakasone, who would later become Prime Minister and a powerful advocate of atomic energy, was serving as a naval officer in Japan when Hiroshima was bombed. After the war, he began the work of persuading the U.S. to sell Japan nuclear technology.

“I strongly felt that Japan should rebuild itself with science and technology,” Nakasone wrote in his autobiography in 2004. “Japan needed to move with the times or we would be left behind immediately.”

Despite the stigma attached to anything nuclear in Japan, there were forceful arguments to pursue it for energy supply and security.

U.S. fire bombings before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were concentrated in urban areas and destroyed thermal generators, grids and transformers, leaving hydropower plants in rural areas as the main source of energy.

Japan's Reconstruction

Meanwhile, electricity demand more than doubled to 33.9 billion kilowatt hours from 16.4 billion kilowatt hours in the five years from 1945 as Japan's reconstruction took off.

Japan's interest coincided with U.S. concern about what to do with its own surplus of weapons-grade plutonium, and the suspicion that created in the Soviet Union, Laura E. Hein wrote in “Fueling Growth -- The Energy Revolution and Economic Policy in Postwar Japan.”

U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower's solution was the “Atoms for Peace” program to use U.S. plutonium to provide nuclear fuel for its allies.

The plan had the advantage of making allies dependent on technology from corporate giants General Electric Co. and Westinghouse, according to Michael Donnelly, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto who studies Japan's nuclear program.

“I can't believe that any decision of this sort would not involve consideration that nuclear energy programs would benefit American manufacturers,” Donnelly said in a phone interview.

CIA Involvement

Still, officials in both the U.S. and Japan had to work on persuading the public that nuclear technology could have a civilian use. Nuclear supporters in Japan were helped by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, says Tetsuo Arima, a professor of media studies at Tokyo's Waseda University who studied declassified documents on postwar relations between the two countries in the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration to establish the link.

Among the CIA's Japanese allies in the propaganda effort was Matsutaro Shoriki, owner of the Yomiuri newspaper and Nippon Television, Japan's first commercial TV station. The newspaper - - now the world's biggest with 10 million copies published daily -- wrote a series of pro-nuclear articles from Jan. 1954 viewed by the U.S. government as a success, according to the book “Nuclear Power, Shoriki and the CIA,” written by Arima and published in 2008.

Walt Disney

The Walt Disney Co. was also roped into the effort. The 1957 cartoon “Our Friend, The Atom,” released as part of the company's Tomorrowland project and depicting the positive benefits of a world harnessing atomic energy, was run on Shoriki's TV channel, Arima wrote.

The Yomiuri newspaper declined to comment on Arima's book when contacted by Bloomberg. Arima also declined to comment on whether the newspaper had responded to his book.

In 1954, Nakasone submitted a bill to parliament to finance nuclear energy research. Lawmakers set the budget at 235 million yen after uranium 235, a fuel used in atomic reactors, according to his autobiography. In 1955, the U.S.-Japan Atomic Energy Agreement gave Japan the right to buy nuclear fuel and technology from the U.S.

By September 1956, Shoriki, who was then head of Japan's Atomic Energy Commission, announced the country's long-term plan for nuclear power, included importing reactors before developing its own. The Tokai station, the country's first, was built by government-backed Japan Atomic Power Co. in the 1960s in Ibaraki prefecture, northeast of Tokyo.

Intense Pressure

It was into this environment of government-led nuclear development that Kikawada stepped when he became president of Tepco in 1961. The company had begun research into atomic energy and was already looking for potential sites for a reactor in the late 1950s, according to its official history.

“It was inevitable that we would rely more on nuclear for future power supply as nuclear fuel needs less foreign currency than oil,” the official history said.

It was a period of rapid economic expansion in Japan and employees at the country's power utilities were under intense pressure to feed the growth.

The demands on Kikawada were so extreme that when his mother, Nusa, died in 1950, he arrived in the middle of the ceremony, kept his taxi waiting outside and left after five or 10 minutes, Yamaki, his neighbor in Yamafunyu, said.

“That was the last time I met him,” Yamaki said. “I dug Nusa's grave.”

Planning Fukushima

Fukushima prefecture began working to attract a utility to build a nuclear plant in the region in 1958, according to Tepco. Shortly after Kikawada took over, the towns of Okuma and Futaba agreed to host a nuclear station.

Kikawada, who appears balding in spectacles wearing a western-style suit and tie in black and white photos, still had a decision to make.

“Kikawada once said that building a nuclear plant is like doing a deal with the devil,” Soichiro Tahara, author of “Documentary, Tokyo Electric,” said in an interview in August. He changed his mind in part because he didn't want the government to control atomic energy after it had led Japan into a disastrous war, Tahara said.

“If Kikawada had decided to go against nuclear power, the government would have taken it over,” he said.

Nuclear Obsession

Based on his own writings and commentaries by others, Kikawada cuts a complex figure. In his autobiography, he credits Eijiro Kawai, his lecturer in economics and the humanities at the University of Tokyo, for instilling in him “social values.”

Kawai was arrested by Japanese authorities and imprisoned during World War II for his writings calling for a more even distribution of the country's wealth.

Yet as head of Japan's largest utility, Kikawada was also a pragmatist. With few sources of its own outside coal and hydropower, energy security had long been an obsession among Japanese leaders. The U.S. imposition of an oil embargo on Japan in 1941 led to its decision to attack Pearl Harbor the same year.

“From its expansionist role in World War II to its activist industrial policies of the 1970s and 1980s, energy security has played an important -- and sometimes overriding -- role in Japanese foreign and domestic policy,” according to a report in 2000 by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.

Unique Leader

“Kikawada was a unique business leader, combining capitalism with a social consciousness,” recalls Teruaki Masumoto, a former Tepco vice president who joined the company in 1962 and served under Kikawada. “Japan had no energy resources of its own and he saw Tepco's role as one of enabling economic development.”

Under his 10-year watch, Tokyo Electric grew to be the world's largest private utility, according to “The Nuclear Barons” by Peter Pringle and James Spigelman, which documents the growth of the global nuclear power industry. That made him a key figure in Japan's search for energy to allow manufacturers like Toyota, Sony and Hitachi Ltd. to run their factories and turn out the products that made them global brand names.

Kikawada did give the go-ahead for the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant on the east coast of Japan and construction began in 1967. The design included a village with a church and elementary school for the families of engineers from General Electric who remained until 1979, according to Tepco's official history.

Golden Era

It was the beginning of a golden era in Japan's nuclear power industry. The Atomic Energy Commission in April 1967 unveiled a nuclear plan entailing expansion of power generation capacity to as much as 40,000 megawatts by 1985, including the development of overseas uranium mines.

By 2009 Japan had 54 nuclear reactors generating about 30 percent of the country's electricity. Before the crisis in March, there were plans for 14 more and a target to generate 53 percent of the country's power from nuclear plants by 2030.

This rapid development helped spawn Japan's nuclear village. Nuclear-related spending by Japan's utilities was 2.14 trillion yen ($28 billion) in the year ended March 2010, when 45,382 people were directly employed by the industry, according to the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum.

The nuclear industry also employs tens of thousands of subcontractors and other support services. When the earthquake hit the Fukushima Dai-Ichi station on March 11, Tepco had 6,415 people at the site, including 5,500 subcontractors.

Site Fights

Economic trends in the 1970s, when most plants were built helped persuade local communities to accept nuclear plants so soon after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, says Daniel Aldrich, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University and author of “Site Fights: Divisive Facilities and Civil Society in Japan and the West.”

The period saw rapid depopulation of rural areas as more people sought higher-paid jobs in cities including Osaka and Tokyo, even as the government increased subsidies and benefits to farmers to retain levels of food production and the continuation of rural life.

“In a lot of villages, the nuclear industry was viewed as a lifeline,” Aldrich said in an interview. “Living in Tokyo, people could afford to debate issues related to nuclear power and the risk of radiation. But for people in declining rural areas, these plants were often seen as the last hope to attract investment and growth.”

The following link outlines the FAQ's for the compensation for evacuees from the evacuation zone..... pity it's so late down the track... but I think an effort as such... how can you put a price on peoples lives?????

Oh man... only 100 million beqs now per hour.. phew.... that's better......

.....Fukushima Radiation Release Falls to 100 Million Becquerels/Hour
The amount of radiation being released by the damaged reactors at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant has fallen to about 8 million times less than at the height of the disaster, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said......

A becquerel represents one radioactive decay per second and involves the release of atomic energy, which can damage human cells and DNA......

TOKYO—Workers at Japan's damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant battled Monday to keep radioactive water that has flooded one reactor building from spilling over into the ocean, while the operator said plutonium was detected in samples of soil taken from the compound.

Workers at the Fukushima nuclear plant are battling to keep pools of radioactive water from flooding into the ocean. Meanwhile, small amounts of plutonium have been found in the soil around the plant. WSJ's Mariko Sanchanta and Yumiko Ono discuss.

The plutonium discovery, along with readings of the contaminated pool, offered the strongest signs yet that the reactor's core may have partially melted. The new reports "back up the view that there was a partial melting of the fuel rods,'' chief government spokesman Yukio Edano said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
Operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the plutonium was found at low levels that pose no risk to human health and are unlikely to affect the repair work. But the discovery is expected to add to the urgency of the task to bring the reactors under control.
Monday's events brought a new turn to the complex battle to stem disaster at the nuclear complex. Since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems at the plant, the prime battle has been to bring overheating reactors down to safe temperatures. Last week, after crews doused reactors with salt- and freshwater, temperatures stopped rising.
Plant officials are now facing standing water in four of the complex's six reactor buildings, at least one of which is a pool of highly radioactive water. That poses dangers to personnel on the site and threatens to bedevil further work.

Researchers say high concentrations of radioactive caesium have been detected in plankton in the Pacific Ocean off the shattered Fukushima nuclear plant. The Fukushima nuclear plant was badly damaged in the March earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan, and has been leaking radiation ever since.
It is feared more radiation could now enter the food chain.

A WORKER at Japan's disaster-stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant died yesterday of an unknown cause.

The male worker, in his 50s, was taken to hospital for treatment Wednesday after feeling ill during a regular morning assembly at the plant, some 200 kilometres north of Tokyo, according to Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO).More here....

Monday, 3 October 2011

A tea producer blended the tea with radioactive cesium with the tea without radioactive cesium so that he could sell off his radioactive tea. An operator of a sewer sludge plant knowingly sold radioactive sludge to a manufacturer of garden soil because there was no national government standard when he sold it. Their reason: "It's safer that way, as radioactive cesium will be diluted".

Many Japanese consumers seem dismayed to find out that there are people among them who would do such a thing, but there are people like that, unfortunately. And as the article cites one government agency, it is clearly none of the government's business to do anything about it anytime soon.

Dilute cesium and sell - blend tea, garden soil - so that the cesium level is below the limit

After the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident spread radioactive materials, the provisional safety limit was set for variety of foods and goods. If an item tests less than the provisional limit it is considered "guaranteed safe". As the result, there are businesses that mix [radioactive goods] with those made in places far away from Fukushima Prefecture to dilute radioactive materials and sell them. Currently it is not against the law to do so, but the consumers who doubt the safety of the products and the producers who fear further "baseless rumor" damages are voicing concern.